Today I solved a major snag that's bugged me for serveral weeks. Although it was cool being able to finally plug my cell phone to my pc for internet, that nothing compared to not having the correct info to set up rights for remote development.

Well after today, that has all changed. After reading some fairly important msdn articles here, I found the rather important fact that all remote developers must have accounts on the web server in question, and if it is a Windows box, everyone must be added to the VS_Developers local machine users group. If you've ever had a similar experience, would you please send me an email or post a comment? Thanks!

We had a great time on Halloween Night! My wife Jill went as “Arwen” of Rivendell, I went as “Aragon Son of Arathorn” complete with props, and friend Erindal with her young one Joya went as “The Good Fairly” and “The Princess To Be” respectively.

Calling all Hallow's Eve party throwers! If you're throwing a Halloween bash next year PLEASE EMAIL --> matthew@klump-pdx.com.

We had a great time at the Hillsboro Community Halloween Party, here's our gang (Art Mcgee was behind the camera at the time):

At this point I am discontinuing my project event logging on this sight for the sake of security. I will definitly continue to post for cool stuff going on like having dressed up like my favorite “Rings” character “Aragon Son of Arathorn,” and Jill going as “Arawin Daughter of Elrond.” Pics to be posted soon...

For today, I finished rewriting the introduction for Iteration 1 correctly. This explains what I hope to have done by next Tuesday's dead line. It seems as though my to-do list has quadrupled over night...

For those of you running WIN XP SP 2 and you are using FTP for your projects, make sure you follow these steps to keep from near tearing your hair out if you use internet explorer to access your FTP server:

Under the tools->internet options->advanced Tab:

1) Make sure that you have “Enable folder view for FTP sites” enabled/checked !

2) Make sure that you have “Use Passive FTP (for firewall and DSL modem compatibility)” unchecked/disabled !

If this saved you several hours of time and you're running win xp sp2, please comment here! I'd love to hear your comments of what has and has not worked for you with the SP 2.

For the design session, I flushed out some more details by creating a stratospheric view document that describes the over all actions and interactions going on in my project. This use case visio diagram further describes all the actors and systems external to my project that have a remote possibility (and within the scope/domian) of interacting with this project as well as use case situations going inside the system/project.

Today in the laboratory for senior project at OIT Portland, I had a fantastic experience with Jay Bockelman (See Picture of us Below) exploring and visually diagramming some high level modularized ideas for building "The Puzzler - 3D Style."

The digital record of our notes is available here for download (photo images). Use cases are just about complete and will be ready for inspection by the Due Date on Tuesday, October 19, 2004. Come back and visit for more details about this evolving project inspired by Scott Hanselman.

I can personally attest that Rory and Scott's presentation did not suck. Far from it! The best I got out of it was the new concept of the Provider Pattern for ASP.NET 2.0 Beta. During the swag competition, I was fortunate enough to get a copy of the ASP.NET 2.0 Beta guide book.

Of course after having gotten the book the first thing I did was to lookup “Provider Pattern” for the detailed info (I realize I could have done it online but this was so much more fun!).

Some other gold nuggets I found was the concept of a “Master Page“, and a complete chapter dedicated to just “Data Binding.“ Check out the new ASP.NET! I think you'll really like what you see.

Here in Portland, the market for Software Developers may still be sluggish, but most certainly not impossible. Back in August we had a very important seminar at PADNUG discussing the ins and outs of the business side of software dev.

At the time, someone brought up a very interesting question. So what is the going rate people should charge out for consulting here in Portland? Alot of us answered back by saying it has alot to do with what language skill is required for which ever project and the number of years experience with that language. To help with that point, an audience wide survey was done so folks could get an idea of what would generally be charged with a given language in Portland.

For anyone needing an idea of how this turned out, the spreadsheet results are available here. For folks needing a zipped version, that is available here. Much Thanks do to Rich and Howe for compiling this.